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Just a moment, we're improving your Skype experience...

Started by Ambient Sheep, December 05, 2013, 10:23:52 PM

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Ambient Sheep

"Just a moment, we're improving your Skype experience..."

No, no you're not.  Improving my Skype experience would be NOT interrupting a rather nice conversation I was having with someone five minutes into it, just so you can do yet another shitty upgrade that will make no difference whatsoever, unless it's a negative one.

Forcing me to do a reboot to finish the job, just minutes after I've finally set up all my windows and tabs how I like them following an all-day power-cut, is just taking the piss even further.

I cannot believe that Microsoft make me use this shit.  I remember talking to, and yes even camming with, people, using MSN Messenger 4.6 back in 2001, on a machine a tenth of the speed and with 1/4 of the RAM of the one I use now, even over dial-up, ffs (although I won't pretend the frame-rate was great!).  It took a fraction of the resources, didn't hog my whole machine, and didn't constantly fucking interrupt me to do fucking upgrades.

Progress?  The only progress they need is a shotgun to the balls.

Ambient Sheep

Not only that, but when my PC came back up again, I got to my desktop, and then got a perpetual hourglass.  After giving it 10 minutes or so, I brought up Task Manager which showed nothing unusual and no activity by Skype itself or anything related at all.  So it seems to have trashed my system.  Am rebooting it again now.  (I am typing this on a half-fucked laptop running an Ubuntu Live CD.)

Am sorry, I suppose I should have put this in Technology but (a) I'd forgotten that that forum existed, and (b) it was initially just a general whine about fucking Skype, not an "oh shit my PC is fucked" thread.

Microsoft, I hope you all end up sucking Satan's cocks in hell.

Don_Preston

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on December 05, 2013, 10:43:01 PM
Am rebooting it again now.  (I am typing this on a half-fucked laptop running an Ubuntu Live CD.)

One of the greatest High Life bands of the 70s.

stunted

Blimey, just heard a bit and they've gone pop! Have they stopped playing on decommissioned nuclear subs now?

Depressed Beyond Tables

Skype stopped working with my camera after an update and I was informed that perhaps I needed to purchase one, with suggestions of course.

After a bit of searching I found other people were having the same issue, and get this, an actual Skype rep recommended uninstalling the latest version and using an earlier release. It worked!

Now that's progress.

NoSleep

I'm still using a pre-MS version of Skype (the last ever that supported PPC Macs) so I should count myself lucky. I knew this marriage from hell would end in tears.

HappyTree

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on December 05, 2013, 10:43:01 PM
Microsoft, I hope you all end up sucking Satan's cocks in hell.
It ends as it began.

I solved my Skype problems by stopping using it. Now it works so well I hardly notice it's there.[nb]It's not.[/nb]


Ambient Sheep

After three consecutive reboots, my main machine is now starting to resemble normalcy.  First time, hung with hourglass as mentioned.  Second time, it seemed to come up, but 3/4s of my system tray (including the volume control) was AWOL.  Third time lucky, I think.  I haven't DARED try running Skype again yet.

It's only fucking 2013, guys.


Quote from: HappyTree on December 05, 2013, 11:01:15 PMI solved my Skype problems by stopping using it. Now it works so well I hardly notice it's there.[nb]It's not.[/nb]

Trust me, I avoid it whenever I can.  In fact nowadays I use Pidgin wherever possible, takes half the RAM of any of the official clients, and lets me speak all their protocols (except Skype).  However since the Skype/MSN merger, I can't add any new contacts to my MSN account (the old ones still work), so sometimes it's a necessary but great evil.  When Google drop XMPP support for what used to be Gtalk/Gchat, things are going to get even worse. :-(

For a while there, we had a really great system for talking to people quickly and easily.  Why did we have to balkanise it?


Fake EDIT:  Ok, so I just dared to try running the fucker.  It immediately comes back with "Fatal Error.  Failed to get proc address for GetLogicalProcessorInformation (KERNEL32.dll)".  So for now it seems to have just fucked itself (since the rest of the PC is now working fine, I'm assuming that my kernel32.dll is just fine, thanks).  I suppose I shall have to uninstall and - unfortunately - reinstall at some point, stupid thing.

Real EDIT: Oh, and re. the tag, I used to get told my connection was slow when I used to regularly chat to a friend on it.  My connection is 8Mb/s down, 448kb/s up.  Hers was 6Mb/s down, 896kb/s up.  And yet the picture quality was regularly worse than MSN/Windows Live Messenger had been.  Diabolical.  But then, MSN/WLM used to route cam traffic direct P2P, rather than through the NS..., er, Microsoft's servers like Skype does... I can only assume the bad guys were holding up pieces of paper to each other with their terrible plans written on them...

...and hence the question I posed up there has been answered.

katzenjammer

This is probably the update that is going to remove some API features 'due to technology improvements we are making to the Skype experience'.[nb]Possibly the worst corporate bullshit explanation I've ever seen[/nb]  They were going to remove API support altogether but have since backtracked, at least for now, since that would mean crippling a lot of people's hardware, the stuff from 3rd party vendors AND Skype branded phones etc.

Unfortunately messaging addons like skype4pidgin that can be used with an encryption plugin to prevent the good people at microsoft and their NSA buddies being able to snoop on chat sessions will definitely not work any more.  Now there's a coincidence.

Ambient Sheep

#9
Quote from: katzenjammer on December 05, 2013, 11:28:20 PMUnfortunately messaging addons like skype4pidgin that can be used with an encryption plugin to prevent the good people at microsoft and their NSA buddies being able to snoop on chat sessions will definitely not work any more.  Now there's a coincidence.

Bugger, as in an attempt to reduce the memory footprint of the fucker, I used to keep it minimised and use the Pidgin plugin to talk to it. :-(  And I wasn't even doing encryption or anything like that, if the Agency want to read my filthy conversations, they can.

I JUST WANT A CHAT (and occasionally cam) SOLUTION THAT WORKS, DAMN YOU ALL, YOU CUNTS!!!  IT'S 2013, WHY IS THIS SO HARD, WHEN IN 2001 IT WAS SO EASY?????


Quote from: taggerReboot faster, I'm losing my erection

:-D

Hehe we've all been there, but in this case I never even got the chance before it pounced on me five minutes into the convo.

And actually, I've not done anything like that in a LONG time now...


katzenjammer

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on December 05, 2013, 10:43:01 PM

Microsoft, I hope you all end up sucking Satan's cocks in hell.

I made a fresh install of windows 7 the other day, did nothing to it apart from install drivers and then let it spend an hour or so running through Windows update which included updating IE to version 11.  When it was finished I opened IE up and... nothing.  White screen.  Couldn't even load a single webpage. Impressive stuff.

hedgehog90

Skype.... Don't get me started on that horrid piece of cuntware.
I made a thread about it a few months ago because it was giving me serious grief. Fatal errors, endlessly connecting, dropping out, and to top it all off the process/task were unkillable so it required a reboot every time it catastrophically fucked up.
And what the FUCK is it in Skype that makes it such a greedy fucking resource hog? Its INSANE!
Just starting the application makes my computer strain like it's initializing video editting software.
God it's SHIT! How do they get away with this!? And just imagine the millions they're making off this vile fuck-app.
It would give me such pleasure to uninstall it and manually delete every one of its pustule-like appdata/programdata files... But I can't, I have to begrudgingly use it every day.
It's just such a drag to know it's WON! IT FUCKING OWNS ME!!!

Ambient Sheep

Quote from: Ambient Sheep on December 05, 2013, 11:21:27 PMOk, so I just dared to try running the fucker.  It immediately comes back with "Fatal Error.  Failed to get proc address for GetLogicalProcessorInformation (KERNEL32.dll)".

Turns out this is because I'm still on XP SP2 (I haven't dared try to upgrade to SP3 on an 11-year-old Dell Pentium 4 @ 2.4GHz with 512MB of RDRAM - advice on whether or not this would be a good idea would be appreciated, as I'm aware that the April 2014 deadline for XP support is looming and I've been thinking about whether or not to try to at least update it by then).

Skype versions above V6.6 require SP3 as they (or more likely the C++ libraries they're built on) call GetLogicalProcessorInformation at startup, which is only present in XP SP3 and above.

Helpfully (for once, no sarcasm), as well as telling people that they REALLY should upgrade to SP3, the Skype people on their forums (which I found by googling the above error message, there's LOADS of threads on this) also offer the alternative of downgrading back to V6.6, which you can do by downloading this little baby:

http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_6.6.0.106.msi

Interestingly, one poster mentioned their machine spec., and it was identical to mine, at which the Skype person said "The latest Skype version might not run at all on such old system. Try to install the older 6.1.0.129 version..." and gave them a link to an even older version instead:

http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_6.1.0.129.msi

I went for 6.6, as I'm fairly sure I was running that or something pretty close to it beforehand, and it seems to load up ok, and I've done a voice test-call on it, but I've not tried making a video call, mainly as no fucker is up at this time of the morning.

Whichever one you go for, as soon as you sign in you have to dive for the Tools-Options-Advanced-Automatic updates menu and hit the big Turn off automatic updates button pretty damn quickly -- in my case it still tried to "improve my experience" anyway but I hit Cancel on it and it backed out gracefully.  Unloading Skype and then reloading it confirms that it doesn't try to do it again once you've changed that setting.  Fuck, I wish I'd known about that button before.

This version still seems to work with Pidgin, although Skype no longer gives me the "Pidgin is trying to hide me, is this ok?" message when I start it up.  (Maybe it's finally taken notice of the "Don't ask me again" tickbox that I always used to tick and it always used to ignore.)

So, success for now.

However, given that the objective of the upgrade seems to be to stop naughty people using it with Pidgin running the encryption plug-in, I wonder how long the above older versions will be allowed to run on the network?!


Ambient Sheep

Quote from: hedgehog90 on December 06, 2013, 01:48:59 AMSkype.... Don't get me started on that horrid piece of cuntware...

Oooh, what a lovely word.  Amazingly, never come across it before.  But if ever a bit of software deserved it, it was Skype.

I loved your rant, I could have written it myself.  How do they get away with indeed?  Especially given, as I pointed out, MSN Messenger was doing it all 12 years ago to nearly the same standard (and arguably better in some ways) on machines with a fraction of the power.


By the way, although I started this thread just as a let-off-steam rant thing, since it's become a bit more techy now (your glorious rant excepted), I've PM'd Neil and asked him to boot it over to Technology if he thinks it's justified.


Zetetic

I would imagine that any objective relating to the API is about getting people's eyeballs, not so much preventing them using OTR encryption (since anyone interested in that would presumably just use another protocol, indeed run their own XMPP servers probably).

Famous Mortimer

Presumably there's a less resource-hog alternative? Is Ventrilo still a thing?

NoSleep

Isn't Ventrilo more of a gamer/team/conference thing? I experimented with Teamspeak, using it to pull in large numbers of users simultaneously for CaB Radio. You need to hire a server for Teamspeak (was costing me about £8 for 3 months), but it is possible to set a server up on your own machine for free. It very efficient on bandwidth, compared to Skype, as it only uses bandwidth while someone talks (either voice activated or push button), whilst the amount of bandwidth per person is entirely configurable. Having set it up, it's a fairly painless process for first-time client-users to connect with few problems (and for free, providing they only connect to other's servers).

There's an open-source alternative called Mumble, but you need to be a little better versed in its ways to get it running successfully.

Skype became out-dated pretty quickly didn't it? It was meant to be some kind of revolution when it came out - finally, you can call a normal phone for dirt cheap or even free, even internationally! But as more and more people joined the digital age, the phone itself became obsolete, to the point that Skype doesn't even seem to bill itself as a phone alternative anymore. It's just a chat program, same as literally all the others, and now everyone just talks on Facebook to each other, why would you need a separate chat program?

Unless you're paying Romanian girls to put on sex shows for you.

HappyTree

I needed to be able to conduct lessons remotely at work for people who can't come to the school. We talked about using Skype for video interaction but it worked really badly and we ended up using Microsoft Lync which is much better and has more useful features like screen and program sharing and a cool whiteboard thing for scribbling.

Skype is now like that really cheap and crappy pair of trainers that falls apart after 2 weeks.

Zetetic

Edit: It's not right (since Skype never worked well for you).

I'm still sure Microsoft are perfectly happy about this state of affairs.

It's a shame that Jingle was never/is not more widely supported.

Famous Mortimer